Song for a Sunday

on Film, Song for a Sunday

Song for a Sunday - Be My Baby (The Ronettes, Mean Streets)

mean streets

It’s hard sometimes to remember that Martin Scorcese, the undisputed elder statesman of American cinema and advocate for cinema more generally, was once a scrappy kid trying to cobble together a feature film.

But he definitely was, and that film was Mean Streets, a slice-of-life portrait of what it means to make it in America, specifically as an Italian-American male, and focused on barely grown-up kids struggling with crime, faith, and responsibility.

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on Film, Song for a Sunday

Song for a Sunday – Hip To Be Square (Huey Lewis and The News, American Psycho)

american psycho

“I like my bands in business suits, I watch them on TV
I’m working out ‘most everyday and watching what I eat
They tell me that it’s good for me, but I don’t even care
I know that it’s crazy
I know that it’s nowhere
But there is no denying that
It’s hip to be square!”

As Huey Lewis sings these wise, profoundly un-hip words over the stereo, Christian Bale’s unhinged, upper-class psychopath Patrick Bateman moonwalks through the room and slaughters a rival with an ax in his tastefully decorated apartment.

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on Film, Song for a Sunday

Song for a Sunday – Jockey Full of Bourbon (Tom Waits, Down By Law)

Jim Jarmusch’s films are all about textures and surfaces. It sometimes feels like he’s hinting at wellsprings of deeper meaning or emotion, but everything is held at a remove – cold, observing, often ironic. This probably contributes to the love-it-or-hate-it reactions his films seem to inspire, especially the early ones: are they studies in the carefully calibrated hipsterism of people who cloak their authentic selves in the trappings of cool, or particularly egregious examples of it?

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on Song for a Sunday

Song for a Sunday: Then He Kissed Me (The Crystals, Goodfellas)

One of the Big Deals of the 70s films we’d later refer to as the New Hollywood was their use of contemporary music, as opposed to a scripted score or relying on the classics. These choices could comment on the things happening on the screen, underline them, or invert them: Robert DeNiro’s entrance in Martin Scorcese’s Mean Streets to the Rolling Stones’ “Jumping Jack Flash” manages to do all three at once.

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on Song for a Sunday

Song for a Sunday - “He Needs Me” (Popeye, Robert Altman, 1980)

Of all the American directors who came to prominence in the 1970s, Robert Altman is the warmest, the most democratic and the most disarming. The overlapping dialogue, shaggy plots, lived-in sets, and sharp characterization make nearly all of his films feel both like “slices of life” and something much more personal and unique — it’s just that the lives being portrayed are themselves theatrical and all over the place.

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